"It's a "Porch-uh"" (ikazuchi)
02/18/2016 at 16:24 • Filed to: 24hrs of LeMons
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"It's a "Porch-uh"" (ikazuchi)
02/18/2016 at 16:24 • Filed to: 24hrs of LeMons | 2
| 2 |
It was a beautiful weekend at Sonoma Raceway. Temperatures in the mid- to low-seventies. Green hillsides. The smell of E85 and 100 octane in the air. Two freshly built motors. What could go wrong?
We normally pick one of our two cars to do a race. The Honda lives in Northern California and usually runs Sonoma and Thunderhill, while the BMW lives in San Diego and takes on the living hell that is Buttonwillow in late-June. Our luck with motors, well rods and their bearings, at LeMons is not great (especially with the Honda) so, this time, we decided to run both cars to double our chances of not finishing.
Last year the Honda (a 1990 Civic hatchback) decided to shred its bottom-end, and after a couple years of patching the beat-to-shit B18 back together, it was decided to replace it. This time with a nice, little B16.
Because the Civic was still sidelined in December, we decided to haul the BMW (a 1991 318is) up to Sonoma for the last race of the year, where it shredded the #4 rod bearing on Sunday. Again, that motor was also pretty worn out after lasting a couple years of LeMons races, so the M42 (yeah, we’re one of the only 4-cylinder BMWs out there) was torn down and rebuilt.
Before making the 500-mile trek north, the BMW spent a couple days on the dyno to sort out the tune. This did not go as well as it could, and the guys (who know way more about this stuff than me) struggled with getting the motor to run right all week. Once we got up there on Friday morning, the car was straight into the garage with the laptop plugged in, trying to get it to run right. Not a good start.
The Civic was in relatively good shape. We paid for the test & tune day Friday and took it out for some shakedown laps, which turned out to be a smart moved because we found a few issues. First, the throttle butterfly was sticking, so getting on-throttle after it closed made the car leap forward as it popped open (super fun mid-corner). This was easily fixed by cracking it open a bit with the idle screw. Second, the rear tires were rubbing in some of the corners. The new wheels were offset a bit more, so to fix this we rolled the fenders with some channel locks and a jack handle. Beautiful.
The third, and most troubling issue was that the transaxle was grinding on upshifts to third. This was extra annoying because we just had the transaxle rebuilt with new synchros. Now we are double-clutching into 3rd each time, which was a lot considering all we used at Sonoma was 2nd and 3rd gear. We considered yanking it out of the car and getting the transmission builder down to the track to fix it that night, but lucky for him the parts were out of stock.
The BMW struggled with tuning all day Friday. It wouldn’t fire up consistently and ran horribly. Fifteen minutes before tech closes, they limp it over and get checked out. We’re not sure if the tune is pushing out more exhaust, or if the packing on the muffler is shot, but it’s loud. Too loud apparently. Tech tells us that the car will be black flagged if we go out like this. They also say that this is “probably the worst-sounding car” they’ve heard. Awesome.
One of the guys back in San Diego hasn’t left the shop yet, as he needs to run things then fly up that night. He’s now got a nice packing list: new muffler, four new rotors (these were forgotten when loading the truck), and VANOS tools (to help out another team). Somehow he wasn’t detained by Homeland Security and made it to SFO with a bag full of car parts.
Turns out another team, who felt really bad for rear-ending me under caution in the last race, had a spare muffler and some pipe, so in LeMons fashion, it was just welded onto our existing exhaust. Just hope nobody rear-ends us there again because it does stick out a scoach.
Saturday is not much better for the BMW. They get it on-grid (where luckily it didn’t stall or die) and manage to run a few laps, but then it’s back in with high temps and water pouring from the radiator. The radiator is replaced and it’s back out, but not for long. Turns out it wasn’t the radiator, but combustion pressure sneaking through the head gasket into the water jacket and pushing it out the radiator bleed. So they get to work on pulling the head.
Meanwhile, I’m very glad that I’m signed up with the Civic and able to turn some laps. All day the car runs strong and we get to work on not grinding into 3rd gear. Our laps times are up with most of the leaders, but most of them aren’t running little 11-gallon fuel tanks and E85 (not great mileage) so we have to stop about every hour (most of them run 2-hour stints). The end of the day we’re in 54th place out of 110 cars, and I feel lucky to be that far up.
The 24hours of LeMons is filled with drivers who think they’re professionals after they get a few races under their belts. The first race they’re cautious, but irritated by the guys dive-bombing them in the corners, pushing them off-line and clentching their sphincters. So in their next race they get more aggressive. Then the next race they’re even more confident and aggressive. They start going for gaps that aren’t there, expecting the other drivers to move out of the way, because that’s what they’ve done before. Now you’re mixing aggressive drivers, with timid drivers, with fast cars and big, slow boats. Collisions are going to happen and they are going to get progressively worse. Sonoma, with its fantstic elevation changes and corners just compounds this problem. We only run West-coast events: Thunderhill, Sonoma, and Buttonwillow. Sonoma has the least amount of forward visilbilty and the most amount of collisions. In December I was hit twice. Both under caution because the other driver wasn’t paying enough attention to the flags and came flying around the corner into me. This race we get hit three times: once under caution and twice from guys trying to put their car where there’s no room. They treat their time in the car like a sprint race, forgetting that shaving one second this lap is not going to win the race for them. Drivers like that lead to problems like this.
One of the top 20 teams gets a bit agro and clips the big Hooniverse car on the way up the hill into turn 2. They spin around and are stopped, facing the wrong way on track. A group of cars barrels through turn 1 and one of them, a C4 Corvette has nowhere to go but head-on into the Hooniverse Ranchero. By shear, dumb luck and good safety equipment, both drivers were not badly injured. Both cars were written off and those teams weekends were over. Needless to say, the driver’s meeting the next morning was pretty tense as we all got a talking to.
Back to the BMW. Without a spare head gasket, and no replacement nearby, they guys tried to make the existing one work with liberal amounts of copper coat in the hopes of sealing up the gap. The next morning they found that sadly, it didn’t do much. “A bandaid on a broken leg,” was a saying thrown out as they put the head back on the car.
Sunday started off well. We slowly climbed the ranks, getting in faster and faster laps times as they field thinned out, and tightening up our pit stops. Throughout the morning we slowly moved from the 50s to the 40s, dropping a few spots each time we pitted. Then, disaster.
One of our neighboring teams mentions they saw the Civic involved in a collision. How bad, we’re not sure, but the car isn’t heading in so that must mean it’s not moving under its own power. Our fears were soon confirmed as we see the car getting pushed in by a tow truck, which was much better than being dropped off on the flatbed. At least it’s rolling.
Well, barely rolling. A few cars decided to pull three wide with David down turn 6 (the Carousel) and the outside one pulled in and left David nowhere to go so they kncked into our front-right wheel, pushing it back into the wheel well.
After pulling the wheel off it took us a minute to figure out what gave. Everything looks to be in good shape around the hub, but then we looked forward and found the track bar mountings all shifted over a few inches. Okay, we think we can bend that back good enough to finish, but then we find the axle snapped and the spline is still sitting in the transaxle. Luckily we have a spare axle, but only one, and somehow the boot on the other axle got torn up.
While I’m working on straightening the trackbar with a sledge hammer, the others work on extracting the axle splines. A self-tapping screw and a claw hammer took care of that, so we banged the crumpled fender relatively flat and buttoned the car back up.
I got to take it out next, but just in the drive through the paddock I could tell it needed an alignment. Bad. It pulled hard to the left, but wasn’t uncontrolable, so I took it out for a few laps. By my third lap I was feeling good, but then I started to smell burning transmission fluid (from the leaky boot) and brought it back in. Since it’s not my car, I wasn’t going to be the one making the decision as to whether we risked the transaxle or not.
At this point, there was only two hours left in the race and we were quickly dropping places out of the top 100, so we called it a day. Both cars will be skipping the Arizona race and we will have our sites set on Buttonwillow, all the way in October.
Probably an autocross of trackday in the BMW before that to work out the kinks.
daender
> It's a "Porch-uh"
02/18/2016 at 16:43 |
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Hey, both the BMW and the Civic appears on a Speedhunters article about that LeMons race !
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It's a "Porch-uh"
> daender
02/18/2016 at 17:01 |
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Sweet. That’s me in white suit in the bottom image. Not sure what I’m looking down at.